This week the CSO named Bob Sanna as its new executive director, replacing Brian Hermanson, who served from 2007 until March of this year and left to take charge of the San Luis Obispo Symphony Orchestra in California.

Sanna, 72, founded the New York Philharmonic Free Concert Committee of Long Island and was its chairman for 10 years. The concert is billed as Long Island’s largest public event. Sanna won several media awards in his career in advertising, as president and creative director of New York’s Sanna Mattson MacLeod, from which he retired in 2003.

In an email message, CSO music director Michael Alexander called the recruitment of Sanna “the hardest search I have ever been a part of. We were very particular to make sure we got a person that we felt could help us make the next leap as an organization and fit with our complex needs including managing our youth programs (Georgia Youth Symphony), Chorus, and Jazz initiatives.”

Alexander also noted that the search means the orchestra will “have improved both by getting a proven leader [with] a vision for our role in the community and also by examining our own structure and organizational strategies.”

In a statement, Sanna said: “The level of musical excellence displayed by the CSO is remarkable. The whole organization is filled with energetic, passionate people, and I can’t wait to dive in and try to help continue its expanding service to our community.”

“When the search committee first met, we laid out a wish list of characteristics of the perfect executive director,” said Todd Youngblood, chairman of the orchestra’s board of trustees. “Bob fits that description and, in fact, exceeds it in all kinds of ways. I’m really excited about the enthusiasm and skills he brings to us.”

In a 2009 review of the orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s 80-minute Second Symphony — a cosmic meditation on death and rebirth — I wrote that the Cobb Symphony “has come a remarkable distance in the decade I’ve been hearing them. Its annual budget is now just under $1 million, and it employs 21 core musicians for every concert — mostly section principals — and, depending on the repertoire, beefs up the forces with local free-lancers, church musicians, academics and other skilled musicians looking for an inspiring symphonic outlet. Major works like Mahler’s Second, in a convincing performance, help keep everyone satisfied and eager for the next challenge.”

Sanna’s job, at least initially, will be navigating the sour economy to keep that musical ambition aloft. With his advertising acumen, he might be expected to boost local awareness of the CSO, accelerating the band’s upward spiral.

The song was one of six composed by Báez performed Monday at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Buckhead, the kickoff concert for Rodríguez’s album and the start of a tour that will stop in Austin on Wednesday (for a national clarinet convention) and Washington (at the Venezuelan Embassy) the day after. The whole show was a delight.

And it came as a surprise. A product of Venezuela’s renowned El Sistema educational program, Rodríguez joined the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as bass clarinetist in 2005. Like most musicians in American symphony orchestras, Rodriguez isn’t versed in improvising, and on Monday he read all his music from the printed page. But he can swing and wail and cut the sultriest of expressions, whether it’s on the down-low bass clarinet for Ricardo Mendoza’s “Lagunillas“ or on the standard B-flat soprano clarinet for the fast and furious “Hibiee-Jibiees,” a piece of perpetual motion composed by Marco Granados that captures a sort of thrilling anxiety. (Photos by Nick Arroyo.)

The hour-long concert was a run-through of the new album, loaded with folk songs and recent compositions based on various Latin American styles — merengue, pasillo, bambuco — which are themselves based on African or Afro-Cuban dance rhythms. There’s also the strong spice of colonial Spanish music, with its Arabic, Jewish, Gypsy and continental European influences. Suffice it to say that the cross-cultural stew is aromatic and that music, in its vernacular state, is meant for dancing.

Rodríguez stood as front man playing the lead melodies, with an outstanding backing band filling out the harmonies and rhythms. Roberto Koch, who flew from Venezuela to Atlanta the day before the concert, played a soulful and exacting upright bass. Jackeline Rago, based in San Francisco, did her own little dance as she played maracas, shaking her hands up high to the groove of the music. Composer Báez was the dominant presence, playing guitar and the twangy, four-stringed cuatro, a folk instrument midway between a ukulele and a guitar.

In another of Báez’s songs, “Choro” — based on a traditional Brazilian dance style — he gave himself the opening licks on guitar, sharing the solos with Rodríguez’s bass clarinet. It’s a slow, past-midnight dance number — all in-the-moment emotions and anticipation, very sexy. Antonio Carrillo’s “Como llora una Estrella,” another slow number, with Rodríguez’s velvety clarinet and Rago fluttering on mandolin, felt like a balcony serenade for star-crossed lovers. A very humid, very fetching piece of music.

The Venezuelans were joined in a few songs by Rodríguez’s chums from the ASO, including the versatile Juan Ramirez (an ASO violinist and nationally recognized hot pepper expert) on second guitar, Mike Tiscione on trumpet and trombonist Bill Thomas. They were all together at the end, jamming splendidly, for what could be a mega-hit on the Latin pop charts: Báez’s “Buscando Caimán en Boca’e Caño,” in the “joropo oriental” style, with an ear-catching tune and unstoppable energy. Like everyone else in the audience, I could have listened to the stuff all night.

Listening to a finished piece of music is a pleasure; the sausage-making elements of composition can be rewarding, too. Letters Mozart wrote to his father, Strauss wrote to Hoffmannstahl, or Stravinsky wrote to his publisher, detailing their thoughts during the act of creation, are illuminating documents. Exploring creativity is one part of it, but so is the advice that’s given, and the aesthetic, political or economic realities embedded in that advice.

With social media like Facebook, the exchanges can be savored from afar, and in real time. John Mackey, a fine composer who writes high-energy music for wind ensemble and lives in Austin, Texas, is writing a trombone concerto. He has the New York Philharmonic’s Joseph Alessi as soloist and a New Jersey concert band for the premiere, but he wants to give the concerto a longer life. Deadline is November. Already several weeks into it, he’s been posting updates to his Facebook friends.

Early this afternoon, he posted a new status update:

John Mackey can’t decide whether to put saxes in the Trombone Concerto. Was going to score it for “orchestral winds,” but I’m missing the sax section in the quiet sections.

THERE are no saxophones in standard orchestras, but the instrument’s unique sound, especially low and soft, is a powerful attraction. Within minutes, Mackey’s circle of contacts — he’s got almost 2,000 “friends” — started chiming in:

Friend 1: YES! Please use the saxophones!! Please, please, please!

Friend 2: 5 Bass Saxes only…yeah…

Friend 3: I say no. This way orchestras can do it without having to pay for 4 sax subs. And in this economy…

Friend 4: Uuuuuuhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm…….excuse me?

Friend 5: You certainly need no advice, but Stravinsky in his symphonies of wind instruments does some nice things in his softer passages, sans saxes. Maybe use him as a model? Or Schwanter perhaps?

Friend 6: I’m a bit of a purist and prefer heckelphones, ophicleides and sarrusophones to these new-fangled saxophones…

Friend 6 again: You could always generate parts for us saxes with all movements labeled “Tacet”. Wouldn’t be the first time…

Friend 7: Saxes = orchestras having to hire additional players. Optional, cued parts, maybe, but [Friend 3] is right – in this economy, to get performances, I would go without.

John Mackey: This is what I’m worried about. No saxes=anybody can play the piece — bands or orchestras. Saxes=only college performances. But man, no saxes, AND no contrabass clarinet AND no strings = a challenge that may not be worth the tiny chance that an orchestra would ever program the thing anyway, even if Joe Alessi were the soloist. And it’s tough to beat a pianissimo chord with just saxes and contrabass clarinet…

THREE hours and some 35 messages later, Mackey returns with the definitive status update:

John Mackey: Well, an email this afternoon from one of the major orchestra conductors in the US confirms interest in the piece — if it’s scored for orchestral winds. I said “like the Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments.” I think that helped. There’s obviously nothing to say that an orchestra will touch the piece with or without saxes, but without, they’ll at least look at it. I’m sorry, saxes. You know I love you.

NOW curiosity is piqued to hear how this concerto turns out. I don’t think Mackey was fishing for publicity when he posted on Facebook, but in collecting like-minded friends and posing an interesting question, he effortlessly drew his fans and colleague into a discussion that took a life of its own — on Facebook and on media outlets like ArtsCriticATL.com.

This is particularly interesting just now. Arts groups are desperate to engage potential patrons — and finally realizing that it’ll have to be on the audience’s terms. This is a radical shift in strategy, forced by several long-term factors and the miserable recession. Most arts institutions are so used to one-directional relationships with their audiences — we perform, we control the message; you buy tickets — that striking up an open-ended conversation via social media, and hoping it goes “viral,” seems like the start of an enlightened new era.

On an equally fascinating topic, Mackey’s Web site includes this bathtub party picture. Left to right: composer Mark Adamo, conductor Robert Spano, composers John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, Steve Reich and John Mackey. Read into it what you will … and post your opinions on your own Facebook page.

“The Spawn of Abe,” the first of two tracks, is a 28-minute double concerto for clarinet (Max Christie on B-flat clarinet) and oboe (Mark Rogers), backed by a brilliant collage that evokes the sonic clashes of Charles Ives, updated to the contemporary Middle East. It’s a helter-skelter mix that explores, as Maguire writes in liner notes, the three major monotheistic religions with “incantations of mullahs, rabbis and priests, with the singing of cantors, muezzins and Gregorian Chant, Al-Quaeda ditties, a Bin Laden cameo, American-Jewish comedians, klezmer bands, Arab pop music, bars in Tel Aviv, the streets of Cairo, air raid sirens, jets, helicopters … ”

Inevitably, “The Spawn of Abe” spirals down the funnel of history toward another Holocaust, or maybe an ecumenical apocalypse. Few sounds are as instantly chilling as droning, WWII-era sirens. But after brief consideration, the music instead catapults into cosmic outer space — a little cheesy, perhaps, but satisfying in the context.

The other track, coming in at 40 minutes, is “Narcissus auf Bali,” on the Narcissus and Echo myth. It’s another double concerto of sorts, this time for vibraphone (Trevor Tureski) and marimba (Ryan Scott), backed by an “orchestra” of computer-processed sounds based on gamelan from the Indonesian island of Bali. It’s fun, manic, funny. The climax edges toward generic Hollywood, at which point this clever piece goes Roman Empire Epic on us, and MC Maguire reveals his other career, writing for television and advertising.

These clichéd conclusions show that the composer has a problem with what literary critic Frank Kermode, back in the 1960s, called “the sense of an ending.” But for much of this album, the music is enthralling. It brims with ideas and abundant pleasures. Pop and “world” music are as powerful an influence as 20th-century classical. Indeed, the creator might not deign to call the stuff “classical” at all. 

Great art is supposed to speak for itself, but sometimes the life stories and biographical details are impossible to separate from the art. Mozart’s incomplete Requiem, completed on his deathbed. Van Gogh’s inflamed madness in the Provençal sun as he painted his final canvases. The vivid novels of Irène Némirovsky, penned while in hiding in the months before she was deported to Auschwitz. Sometimes art becomes embedded in legend, which forever shapes our impressions.

The most poignant legend now going in classical music involves composer Lieberson and his wife, the devastatingly gifted singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died of breast cancer just 14 months after she sang “Neruda Songs” at its premiere in May 2005. The five songs are drawn from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s “100 Love Sonnets” and, musically, they’re ravishingly lyrical and tranquil and exquisitely tuned to Neruda’s poetry. And a song like “My Love, if I die and you don’t –” amplifies an already engrossing compositional narrative.

I spoke with Lieberson on the phone from Houston, where he’s undergoing chemotherapy and starting a new life. We began with composing and “Neruda Songs,” but the conversation quickly turned to Lorraine, and to the unexpected twists in his life, then circled back to Lorraine.

Ruhe: Tell me about how you set Neruda’s Spanish. You speak Spanish?

Lieberson: No, I do not. In a way, when you set a poem to music you’re creating a new poem. Spanish isn’t that difficult a language to comprehend; it’s not like setting German, which I find a little more difficult, although I set [German-language] songs for Lorraine [“Rilke Songs”]. Perhaps I have some feeling for language; I don’t know. But Neruda’s Spanish is very beautiful and so evocative and so melodic in its own way, so musical. I actually find English the most difficult language to set.

Ruhe: Ah, I think of your “King Gesar,” in English, which is mostly declaimed song-speech, and only when the narrator assumes the persona of Gesar is it sung.

Lieberson: Well, that’s right. But in the “Neruda Songs,” the most labor-intensive aspect of composing was choosing the poetry. That’s very important to me. With the “Neruda Songs,” I was looking for a series of poems that would connect and make a narrative arc. That was my primary intent in my choices. I’ve written several song cycles, with five poems each, and that seems to make a natural, a balanced, narrative. “Responsiveness” is the word I would use with Neruda’s poems, the imagery, the emotional tone, the domain of sorrow, or love, that he evokes — that’s what I respond to. And once that happens, I don’t think very much about constructing a piece. It becomes intuitive; I just let go. Neruda is a very sensual poet, very ripe, and I found melodies to come quite naturally.

Ruhe: You take the poems almost literally: In the first song, for the line “when autumn climbs up through the vines,” we hear it in the music, the autumn air and the climbing vine….

Lieberson: I deliberately avoided poems that had undertones or were in any way political, which is in a lot of what Neruda wrote. What I was looking for was something pointed and poignant and very human, because it could expand out, so that it becomes everyone’s experience.

Ruhe: I read that Lorraine first read these to you in Spanish. Is that how they entered your ear, in terms of how you set them?

Lieberson: To some extent, yes. She and I read through all one hundred, and she’d mark which ones she liked, although I don’t think we came to an agreement about which ones should be set. [laughter] But surprisingly, I would work on my own, and finish one, and she’d look at it and we’d play through it. Then she’d make suggestions. She had to cancel many engagements in that time, but she sang the “Neruda Songs.” She sang them with several orchestras. You know, Bob Spano conducted Lorraine [in “Neruda Songs”] with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Ruhe: Now he’s proving they’re repertory pieces, beyond the original inspiration.

Lieberson: Kelley now has sung them with many orchestras. I’ve had a request to have a male voice sing them too, a baritone. They’re being taken up by other singers. And I remember standing backstage with Jimmy Levine at Carnegie Hall, and Jimmy asked me for another set of songs, as a sort of follow-up. Lorraine was still alive then, but I told him no, I don’t think a sequel would work well. I didn’t feel like it, frankly. So later I thought I’d write a sort of scena for Lorraine, but that didn’t happen. Then I thought about a set of “Farewell Songs,” I was going to call it, also drawn from the same collection of Neruda’s sonnets. Then I got really sick; I’d been sick taking care of Lorraine but didn’t get myself checked out. My wife and I have moved to Houston for the treatments. I have to be monitored.

Ruhe: Congratulations on getting recently remarried.

Lieberson: Thanks, thanks. The best way I explain falling in love again comes from the last line, Neruda’s last line that closes the last song: “Love, this love has not ended, just as it never had a birth, it has no death, it is like a long river, only changing lands, and changing lips.” That’s how I explain the unexpectedness of falling in love again. And getting married and a whole new life starting and dealing with my illness and composing new works…. George Steel, who runs New York City Opera, asked for an opera and I’m seriously thinking about a one-act comedy, to pair with Stravinsky’s “The Flood”….

Ruhe: Is your latest song cycle, “Songs of Love and Sorrow” [premiered in March in Boston with baritone Gerald Finley], the “Farewell Songs” you’d planned to write after Lorraine’s death?

Lieberson: Not exactly, but there are a lot of references to Lorraine, to personal references, to my wife Rinchen, to the pain and impermanence of life.

Ruhe: It’s a Nerudan concept, perhaps, what’s so monumental can also be so ephemeral.

Lieberson: Yes, that’s what life is. The more you appreciate the impermanence, the more you appreciate all the little moments that take place.

Ruhe: Your faith — your Tibetan Buddhist teachings — must also be informing this.

Peter Lieberson (photo by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson)

Lieberson: I have faith in the truth, and that has come from what the Buddha said and what my teachers have taught me and from personal experience. So I don’t have blind faith that things will be OK. And the first truth that the Buddha taught was the truth of suffering. This isn’t a depressing truth, it’s simply a fact. There’s nothing one can hold on to; at the same time, a tremendous love and poignancy dawns when one realizes that. A love for others, a love for life, a love for experience of life itself.

Ruhe: [long pause] Anything I say after that will sound glib. How is your health now, if I might ask?

Lieberson: You can. It’s … it’s … ephemeral! I’m now being treated for leukemia, such an odd disease, because it’s a secondary condition caused by what I’d call a successful treatment of lymphoma. So the leukemia requires transfusion and chemotherapies, which is why we live in Houston. Houston and Santa Fe.

Ruhe: You’d mentioned you’ve been to Atlanta a lot.

Lieberson: I’ve taught in Atlanta many times, in my earlier days. Teaching Shambhala and Buddhism in Atlanta. Never music. This is the first time I’m being performed in Atlanta. [Editor's note: Actually, LHL performed the "Rilke Songs" at Spivey Hall, with Lieberson in the box seats, house left.] 

Ruhe: I’m guessing you’ll not be here for the Atlanta Symphony performances?

Lieberson: It’s right at a time I have new treatments, and I have no idea how I’ll be feeling afterwards, so travel is very unlikely. It’s funny, because I don’t regard myself as an ill person. I have an illness, but I don’t think of myself as an ill person. That’s helped a lot, actually. It’s not something I’ve had to work at, it’s just the way it is.

Ruhe: An optimism about life?

Lieberson: Not really, I just feel a very basic life force. As long as that lasts, that’s my signal. I can feel the life force. That’s my marker. I also have a lot to live for, my wife, my three children [from his first marriage] who are young women now, and pieces I want to write. (Lower photo by Rinchen Lhamo)

Ruhe: As a composer, you seem to have found your mature voice relatively late, in your mid-50s. You went from a sort of post-serial guy who was all about muscle and structure and a little forbidding … to a sensualist who seemed to emerge from Mahler and Berg and lyricism, but entirely in your own voice. I know how to respond to it, but I don’t know how to put it into words.

Lieberson: That’s my feeling too. It’s something that just appeared and I’m very happy I paid attention to. A lot of it came when I started writing for Lorraine and recognized the power of what she did. I became interested in vocal music after I met her [for his 1997 opera “Ashoka’s Dream” at the Santa Fe Opera]. But honestly, I think it’s something else, and I don’t know how to put my finger on it either. Some people say, “Peter, now your music sounds tonal,” but it doesn’t make sense purely from that point of view. And it doesn’t make sense from my use of 12-tone music, which I’d absorbed and really threw myself into in my younger days. It’s something else. I don’t worry about it, but I’ve allowed whatever it is to come through. I sometimes describe it as a sort of nakedness rather than trying to be “accessible” or “complex.” The essence of how I compose is the same, my ears are the same, but it comes out different, and I can’t explain it.

Ruhe: When you composed “Neruda Songs,” for example, did you start with a melody off the lyrics? What was your process?

Lieberson: Yes, I responded to the words and to the emotional tone of the poem. I heard notes when I read the words. Generally I like the tactile feeling, the sensual feeling of being at the piano, so I compose there. I listen very, very carefully to the words, and the harmony is very intuitive. The great period of jazz, that’s how I learned harmony, Bill Evans and Miles Davis. That was my ear training. Orchestrations come easily to me, and I often hear which instrument should be playing. It’s constant responsiveness; it’s somewhere between improvising and strategizing.

Ruhe: That’s hilarious: “somewhere between improvising and strategizing.” That sums up so much of music history. It’s finding that balance.

Lieberson: You mentioned finding my mature voice. Some people are blessed seeing it right away; for me it took a long time. I think a piece like “Red Garuda,” [premiered by the Boston Symphony in 1999, conducted by Spano], is one of my better pieces, but apparently quite different from the lyricism of “Neruda Songs.” I can assure you that equal attentiveness went into both those works. Probably my earlier pieces were more about testosterone, then I found love, and that’s what you’re hearing now in my music.

Last year, the Atlanta Chamber Players and a local arts patron, Ron Antinori, cooked up a novel idea. Antinori, a banking software mogul, was intrigued by the “48 Hours” filmmaking contest, where you get a subject at 5 p.m. on a Friday and have the weekend to produce a finished film. He asked ACP founder and pianist Paula Peace (below) whether such a thing was possible in music, for composers. Peace said no, but two weeks might be viable.

Bankrolled by the Antinori Foundation, they hatched “Rapido!” and accepted entries from 11 Southern states. Interested composers submitted their names in advance. On the appointed day last summer, they were given an unusual instrumentation (oboe, violin, viola, cello and piano) and a musical form (theme and variations) to ensure that the music was original. The 38 entries, each about five minutes long, were ranked and the top four pieces were performed in October 2009, with three judges and the audience voting on the awards.

The winning work was by Jon Jeffrey Grier, a jazz musician and high school music teacher in South Carolina, who beat out several more prominent composers for the prize. Under the competition rules, Grier was awarded $5,000 to flesh out his short entry into a finished piece, which premiered in April 2010. In my review, I described Grier’s “Diverse Variations on A-C-P” as “13 minutes of marvelous, quirky, touching, moody and thoroughly engrossing music.”

So “Rapido!” worked on two levels: discovering talent and commissioning good music.

Now comes Year Two. The Atlanta Chamber Players are again scouting the South. Boston Musica Viva is performing the same task for New England, and Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble (in above photo) is covering the Midwest. The composers got started yesterday, June 7, and their deadline is June 21. About the sculptural add-on: “As a possible (optional) inspiration for your composition, we offer you three Alexander Calder sculptures, which are located in our three ‘Rapido!’ ensemble cities of Atlanta, Boston and Chicago. Note that contest entries will be judged on musical merit and not on interpretation of the Calder works.” (Below, Calder’s ”Flamingo,” 1974, Federal Center Plaza, Chicago.)

The regional finalists will be announced August 13 and performed by each regional ensemble in October. The winners from that round will advance to the finals, to be performed in Atlanta on January 16, 2011. The “Rapido!” website has all the details.

French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet likes the comprehensive. His recordings of Debussy’s complete works for piano, on five discs, are a revelation: precise and atmospheric and emphasizing the exotic strangeness — a certain tangy, “Oriental” quality — that’s imbedded within Debussy’s music but too rarely brought to the surface.

Now Bavouzet has launched a complete survey of Franz Joseph Haydn’s piano sonatas, also on Chandos, a British label. Volume 1, sensationally enjoyable, includes four oft-recorded sonatas from the late 1760s and 1770s, when the advancing technology of the fortepiano had supplanted the harpsichord.

The pianist’s witty ornamentation and remarkably sensitive touch at the keys illuminate how Haydn’s profundity and invention are always fused with a sense of spontaneity and playfulness, whether it’s the presto finale of the D Major Sonata No. 39, a sort of retro-Baroque dance movement, or the unstoppable urgency of the B minor Sonata No. 47.

Yet the main theme of No. 39′s slow middle movement, a gently curved melody, is achingly lovely, deeply felt. Bavouzet is a complete pianist. He makes a big Yamaha CFIIIS instrument sound exquisitely subtle, and puts the composer into the context of his contemporaries and the Baroque, a bit closer to Scarlatti, perhaps, than to the heavier Austro-German style that came later, of heroic Beethoven.

Scholars still debate how many sonatas Haydn composed, how many were lost and how many in the catalog are not actually by Haydn. A total of 54 extant sonatas is a convincing estimate. I hope Bavouzet records other things in the meantime, but this Haydn series should be a fresh delight for years to come. 

The latest work from Jennifer Higdon is “On a Wire,” which boasts a playfully birdy title and is a sort of concerto grosso for the new-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird and the orchestra. It’s the ASO’s second commission from Higdon, following “City Scape” in 2002. The ASO has also recorded several of her pieces and plans to record “On a Wire” this weekend, produced by Elaine Martone. (Photo of Higdon and cat in her Philadelphia studio by Candace DiCarlo.)

The other premiere is Michael Gandolfi’s “Q.E.D.: Engaging Richard Feynman,” the composer’s first-ever work for chorus and orchestra. It, too, is a second commission from the ASO, following “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” in 2007, which was recorded.

As I wrote in a preview article, Higdon and Gandolfi are market leaders in what’s now firmly the norm in 21st-century American classical music. A generation ago, even a decade ago, composers who wrote music specifically to please an audience were labeled panderers, or trash, by fans of avant-garde modernism. The goal of serious art was to challenge and provoke. To them, the concept of a reputable composer writing “accessible” music was anathema.  (In lower photo, Gandolfi stands in front of Roger Kizik’s painting “The Confederacy of Dunces.”)

Higdon, 47, and Gandolfi, 53, reject that negativity: their music is tonal, usually hummable, often rhythmically alive. They’re not retro or neo-Romantic, but they are alert to popular styles from the 20th century, from Stravinsky and Copland to Hollywood and the Minimalists. Although they both teach at prestigious schools — Higdon at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and Gandolfi at Boston’s New England Conservatory — neither writes for what is dismissively labeled “academically protected styles,” where professors compose music for one another, with a detachment from the ticket-buying public and an inevitable winnowing of ideas.

Instead, Higdon and Gandolfi write for the concert hall and regular symphony audiences. A key to success: their music is highly digestible on first listen. In sum, these composers are not experimenters but craftsmen, who work largely within the boundaries of what audiences already know and like about classical music.

The headline reads “Song of the South,” while the underline asks: “Atlanta has grown into an economic powerhouse. Will its operatic ambitions ever catch up?”

Keown’s article speaks of deflated hopes: “Atlanta seems ripe for a first-rate opera company” and “Atlanta has hit the big time, for sure — except when it comes to opera” and “If the city can have an internationally acclaimed orchestra, why is opera still operating below the radar?”

In short, what’s the matter with Atlanta? The company is finally putting on good performances, and improving steadily, although the recession has forced the opera to cut 25 percent of its performances for the 2010-11 season. Keown doesn’t offer prescriptions for the opera’s success but, among other observations, mentions that it has performed in five venues over the past 20 years.

The opera’s former artistic director and conductor, William Fred Scott, led the company in four of those five venues. A protégé of the eccentrically brilliant Sarah Caldwell in Boston, Scott had been an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra assistant conductor when he was tapped by Kennedy, a distant cousin, to lead what was then called the Atlanta Civic Opera. In the mid-1980s it was bankrupt and facing certain death; by know-how and hard work, Scott put the troupe on its feet and attracted a growing audience.

In reviews, starting in 2000, I often hammered Scott hard, partly for inadequate conducting but mostly for the decisions he made as artistic director — the lackluster (or awful) singers, the feeble stage directors, the mind-set that flabby artistic values were good enough. It’s likely that Scott and Kennedy, who were heroic in saving the company in the 1980s, couldn’t keep up with Atlanta’s growth and sophistication. They didn’t cultivate the newer crop of Atlanta’s richest arts patrons — the Arthur Blanks and Bernie Marcuses. And both Kennedy and Scott used to blame Atlantans for not donating more money to the opera, rather than offer better operas so that Atlantans would have more incentive to give. It was an attitude that drove a lot of people in the arts community crazy.

After he and Kennedy abruptly departed the opera — a year shy of celebrating a 20th anniversary — Scott was named artist-in-residence at Brenau University, a small women’s college in North Georgia. (Top photo: Scott in his heyday at the 4,600-seat Fox Theatre, the opera’s third venue.)

Although in recent years he has conducted occasional public concerts in Atlanta, such as a Brahms “German Requiem” at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Buckhead, and served as host on WABE-FM’s Saturday opera show in the summer months, Scott didn’t much re-connect with Atlanta’s wider music scene. A gifted speaker and enthusiastic educator, Scott’s true potential had yet to be realized.

Now comes news that Atlanta’s elite Westminster Schools has hired Scott as its chorus director, leading student choirs from ninth through 12th grades and teaching music theory. He will start in August. Teaching is perhaps the most noble job of all, and one might imagine Scott becoming the favorite teacher of a generation of students.

“Strengthening our music program with a professional of Fred’s caliber is an example of our ‘Teaching for Tomorrow’ campaign, as we attempt to attract and recruit the best teachers,” Westminster Schools president Bill Clarkson said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have a music legend join our faculty and look forward to his contribution to our music program.”

Every time English pianist Stephen Hough performs in Atlanta — he seems to play either Spivey Hall or Symphony Hall every year or so — he’s interesting in an unexpected way. Hough (pronounced “huff”) is also a blogger, where his expertise includes “theology, art, hats, puddings…” Here’s a recent sample:

“It’s not Mozart, stupid!

“I read yesterday that researchers at Vienna University’s Faculty of Psychology, after 15 years of examining the data, have determined that there is no provable connection between listening to Mozart and increased intelligence — the so-called ‘Mozart effect’. This does not surprise me. I would have been astonished if such a thing could be scientifically verified, not just because I’ve met many musicians who were not particularly bright, but because the whole issue of intelligence as something measurable is open to question. Indeed, many areas of psychology itself remain stubbornly beyond proof….”

You can tell he has a lively mind. On Thursday with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Hough brought the rarely heard original version of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a weighty and awkwardly proportioned work that has neither gone away nor taken hold in the standard repertoire — at least not to Tchaikovsky’s level of popularity. (Alexander Siloti’s revision has been most often heard; this was the ASO’s premiere of the original.) The program will be repeated Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoon.

Hough made what felt like the definitive case for the composer’s own version; I’m sold on it permanently. In the process, he also made a compelling case for the concerto itself. As a brainy, perspiration-free supervirtuoso, he never played up the sentimentality. It was Tchaikovsky freshly scrubbed, a wonder.

In the first movement cadenza, Hough made the hammering 10-finger runs, at top speed, sound like beautifully etched clouds of sound, at once precise and gauzy, with a few pauses of introspection. (He also seemed to be using the pedal on the Hamburg Steinway a lot. Was the instrument acting up?)

The concerto’s slow middle movement offers the pianist almost nothing to do. The movement is admired for the long solos accorded a violin and cello, here played with great feeling by ASO associate concertmaster William Pu and associate principal cellist Daniel Laufer. French conductor Ludovic Morlot, making his ASO debut, led the orchestra in tight, precise gestures, and the whole concerto blazed with a sense of discovery and satisfaction.

The instant standing ovation wasn’t a surprise — Atlanta audiences like to stand, whether it’s for safe and shabby or risky and brilliant — but Hough’s solo encore was unusual: “Moscow Nights,” a 1950s Soviet pop song heard in countless incarnations, including as a piano piece by Van Cliburn. Hough played the song in his own arrangement, which started like Rachmaninoff and segued into Russian-accented Gershwin.

At 36, still young for a conductor, Morlot has built a sterling resume — including regular gigs with Paris’ crack new-music Ensemble Intercontemporain, as the Boston Symphony’s assistant conductor (the same position that launched Robert Spano’s career) and, more recently, conducting major orchestras around the globe.

Morlot is a work in progress. The opening triptych of spooky Russian tone poems by Anatoli Liadov — “The Enchanted Lake,” “Baba-Yaga” and “Kikimora” — showed a conductor with a disciplined baton and a focused and unified interpretation but too little expression, too little musical fantasy.

That carried over to Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” where the orchestra played 45 minutes of excerpts from the complete ballet score. The opening scenes hummed and howled, always with a hard edge. Morlot didn’t seem to ignore the lyricism of the score so much as make it beside the point. “The Young Juliet” scene was nimble and gossamer, yet never carefree as it ought to be in a girlish, pre-Romeo kind of way.

Then came the “Death of Tybalt” scene that ends Act Two — all those slashing chords — and it was electrifying in its savagery. Here Romeo was a cold-eyed killer avenging his friend’s murder. Conductor and orchestra finally seemed to have found a shared voice of expression, and suddenly the ASO was playing its virtuosic and dramatic best. “The Death of Juliet” that followed was achingly lyrical, of small moments, devastating beauty and deep regrets. By concert’s end it was certain: Morlot will soon be big time.